An Innovator's Suggestion for Elderly Care in China

I helped to draft another guest post featured in the Asian Healthcare Blog, accessible here.  It discusses the issues surrounding elderly day care centers in China.  These are a form of care for elderly citizens which are typically located in densely populated residential areas and are intended to provide a center for seniors to have their health monitored while they engage other seniors in a variety of social, as well as physically and mentally challenging activities. However, the truth presents a much more mixed picture.  At worst, some simply become majiang halls, while the better managed only cater to the segment of the population that needs its services the least. 

The post was also inspired in part by the recent book, The Innovator's Prescription, which discusses the need to identify the latent demand in the healthcare market.  I have reproduced the concluding paragraph below:

The difficulties encountered by elderly care centers reflect a discomforting reality in China's elderly care industry. From policy formation, service design, implementation to quality control, there are still too many areas of weakness that need to be addressed. Potentially, the publication The Innovator's Prescription could give us some inspiration to find a solution here. The book draws a parallel between the healthcare industry and personal computers. In the dawn of the technological revolution, the true visionaries did not simply target the existing market for large computers manufactured for research purposes, but recognized consumers' latent demand for personal computers (see the author's conceptual model). Similarly in elderly care centers, the real opportunity might lie in the group that is currently not using elderly day care services (non-consumers) who are a much larger group than current users (consumers), and in addition are a group with much simpler demands to satisfy. To begin with, a simple solution would be to create day care services tailored to the most urgent nursing care needs of seniors with willingness-to-pay rather than the wishful thinking of making self-sustainable activity centers.